Welcome to the blog of the California Teachers Empowerment Network. CTEN is a non-partisan, non-political group dedicated to providing teachers and the public at large with reliable and balanced information about professional affiliations and positions on educational issues.

The
teachers unions were also in the news recently for having taken offense to the cover of the November 3rd
edition of Time Magazine, which shows a photo of a judge’s gavel about
to pound an apple.

The story, “The War on Teacher Tenure,” is
mostly about the Vergara decision – in which a judge found that the
tenure, seniority and dismissal statutes in the California education code are
unconstitutional. The article focuses on Vergara’s guiding light – David Welch,
a tech titan who has found a second career as an education reformer. It’s a
fair piece, and one worthy of discussion. But the national unions just focused
on the cover and organized protests, demanding that Time apologize. Time did
not apologize, but instead gave various disgruntled parties a chance to respond
to the cover and article, which can be accessed here - http://time.com/3533556/the-war-on-teacher-tenure/

As one who follows education reform issues, I am always
looking for outside-the-box ideas. Here’s one that certainly qualifies: “An
Employee Stock Ownership Plan—for America’s Public Schools.” Benjamin
Scafidi, senior fellow with the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice and
a professor of economics, writes,

Public school teachers and leaders
typically don’t place much value in private school choice’s worth. However,
that education policy could raise their own stock considerably—and literally.
As school choice grows, a teacher investment proposal introduced long ago deserves
revisiting.

In Can Teachers Own Their Own Schools?,
noted economic historian Richard Vedder makes the case for turning over
ownership of public schools to public school employees through an employee
stock ownership plan (ESOP), which began in America’s private sector during the
1970s.

On another futuristic
note, lifelong educator and former union president Doug Tuthill writes, in “The End of ‘School Choice,’”

The annual American Federation for Children
conference is one of the country’s largest gatherings of school choice
advocates. So it was notable, during the most recent conference in Orlando,
that speakers regularly used the terms “parental choice” and “educational
choice,” but not “school choice.”

This shift in semantics reflects an emerging
trend that’s a game changer – the expansion of choice in publicly-funded
education is increasingly including learning options beyond schools.

Florida’s new Personal Learning Scholarship
Account program, for students with special needs such as autism and Down
syndrome, is a good example. In the PLSA program, public funds go into a bank
account that parents can use for numerous state-approved educational options,
including private school tuition, a suite of different therapies, curriculum
materials, instructional technology, and postsecondary education and training.

The ongoing “value-added”
debate has a new contribution. Thomas Kane, researcher at the Harvard Graduate
School of Education, has written “Do Value-Added Estimates Identify Causal
Effects of Teachers and Schools?” in which he concludes,

… there is now
substantial evidence that value-added estimates capture important information
about the causal effects of teachers and schools. Rarely in social
science have we seen such a large number of replications in such a short period
of time. Even more rarely have we seen such convergence in the findings.
The application of statistical controls using longitudinal data systems
often provide meaningful information regarding program impacts even without
random assignment.

The National Council
on Teacher Quality has come out with a second edition of its comprehensive
Teacher Prep Review, and
again the news is not good.

Using evidence from more than 500
higher education institutions that turn out nearly half of the nation’s new
teachers each year, we find that in a majority of institutions (58 percent),
grading standards for teacher candidates are much lower than for students in
other majors on the same campus.

For CTA agency fee
payers, the November 15th deadline has passed, so we hope you have already
submitted your 2014 rebate form. However, if you are a first time filer, you
may resign from the union after the 15th. You will not get the full
amount, but rather a prorated one depending on how long after the 15th
you file. For more information, please visit http://www.ctenhome.org/know.htm

As always, we
at CTEN want to thank you for your ongoing support and invite you to visit us
regularly at www.ctenhome.orgIf
you need any information that you can’t find there, just send us an email at cteninfo@ctenhome.orgor call us at 888-290-8471 and we will get back to you in short order.